Day: April 24, 2018

Closing Thought–24Apr18

I have never been a fan of Nikki Haley as the ambassador to the UN……I thought she was too amateurish to run any sort of foreign policy venue…..

It seems that Haley has broken with her boss, Donald Trump, over the newest round of sanctions against Russia…..or should I say the sanctions that Trump refuses to implant…..Haley was very verbal when a Trump advisers tried to imply that Haley was “confused”……aand she fired back…HARD!

Nikki Haley is at war with Donald Trump. She may be his ambassador to the United Nations, but she wants to set a foreign policy all her own, closer to the global interventionism of George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton than to the muscular but restrained foreign policy that Trump campaigned on in 2016. Her differences with the president were on stark display this week, as she first announced sanctions against Russia that Trump had not approved, then shot back at the new director of the national economic council, Larry Kudlow, when he offered a diplomatic interpretation of her mistake. Kudlow ascribed her off-message remarks to “some momentary confusion,” to which Haley responded, “With all due respect, I don’t get confused.”

https://usa.spectator.co.uk/2018/04/the-war-party-is-ready-for-its-next-campaign-haley-2020/

I do not think she will have a chance in today’s GOP…..it is not what we could call….female friendly.

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Rand Paul: It’s All Show!

Mike Pompeo was narrowly approved by the Senate in a close vote…it was Rand Paul that put him over and after Paul had strolled out and told the media that he was not gonna be a poster child for Trump and his vote could not be counted on……and then as usual he voted affirmative and joined the Trump-ites…..

CIA Director Mike Pompeo is on track to become the next Secretary of State after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to approve him, 11-9. All Republicans voted in favor, and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) voted “present.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was the real deciding vote, having switched sides after opposing Pompeo. Democratic Sen. Coons has also initially voted no, but changed to present as a courtesy because Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) was not present, and voted by proxy. Isakson’s vote would’ve made it 11-10, but only 10-10 among present voters, which would’ve forced Iskason to drive back.

Paul’s change was a surprise to almost everyone.

(antiwar.com)

The media tells us that this move by Paul unexpected after his diatribe against the Trump nominee…..that is pure crap!

Paul has done this on numerous occasions…he comes out in opposition and then when the vote is taken he follows the lead of the rest of the GOP.

Paul is all show….he is just another GOP toady….this was not his first time to pretend to be a maverick……the problem is the media falls for his crap every time and he gets his mug on the TV screen as some sort of maverick….that he is not and will never be…a maverick.

Just keep in mind if all goes to crap and we waltz into another war then we can point the finger at the coward Rand Paul for being all smoke and NO fire…..

Are We Sick Of Clinton Yet?

It seems that we may never get a rest from all things Clinton.

A year and half after the 2016 general election and we are still explaining what happened that allowed Hillary Clinton to lose her race.

She lost because of the Russians or was it the FBI or was it because of her message or maybe she was just an inferior candidate.

In my book she was a terrible candidate that was running against a horrible candidate and horrible won out.

And since November 2016 pundits have been explaining her loss and it is still being told to whoever will listen.  Even books about her and her loss are still being published…..

New York Times reporter Amy Chozick has a new book on Hillary Clinton and the 2016 election, and one anecdote in particular from it was getting attention on Friday. It’s from election night, when Chozick writes in Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling that it finally became clear somebody had to break the news to Clinton that she was going to lose to Donald Trump. The task fell to “Robby Mook, the drained and deflated campaign manager,” per an excerpt in the Times. And when he finally did so, Clinton “didn’t seem all that surprised,” writes Chozick. Then the key Clinton quote: “‘I knew it. I knew this would happen to me,’ she said, now within a couple of inches of Mr. Mook’s ashen face. ‘They were never going to let me be president.'”

The Daily Beast has more on the book, including what would have been the “nut graf” of the Times story on a Clinton victory under the six-column headline “Madam President.” The paragraph would have begun, “No one in modern politics, male or female, has had to withstand more indignities, setbacks and cynicism.” And it would have ended: “But if she was guarded about her feelings and opinions, she believed it was in careful pursuit of a dream for generations of Americans: the election of the country’s first woman president.” The Washington Post review of the book details Chozick’s recollection of dealing with sexism from male Clinton staffers. And it has a quibble: “Unfortunately, too much of the book is devoted to Chozick’s worrying and whining—’Jesus did I whine’—about her status at the Times,” writes Carlos Lozada.

The Dems need to move past the Clinton loss and find the best candidate for 2020…..focusing on Clinton will not produce a good candidate.

Please stop all the whining and accept the loss and move on……politics has become sloppy and worthless…..time for a political revolution…..time to flush the governance toilet as it were.

Just When Afghanistan Means Nothing

Afghanistan has not been in the headlines much lately although reports about the war have been regularly written about here on IST…..well that came to an end yesterday when an attack in the capital of Kabul was reported…..

An ISIS suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan’s capital on Sunday, killing at least 57 people and wounding more than 100 others, officials say. Public Health Ministry spokesman Wahid Majro says that among the 57 killed, 22 were women and eight were children. He says 119 people were wounded, among them 17 children and 52 women, and “the tolls could still rise,” the AP reports. The bomber targeted civilians who were registering for national identification cards, Kabul police chief Gen. Daud Amin says.

The large explosion echoed across the city, shattering windows miles from the attack site and damaging nearby vehicles. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement carried by its Aamaq news agency, saying it had targeted Shiite “apostates.” The attack comes almost a month after an ISIS suicide bomber carried out an attack near a Shiite shrine in Kabul that targeted attendees celebrating the Persian new year. That attack killed 31 people and wounded 65 others. A statement issued by the president’s office condemned Sunday’s attack and quoted President Ashraf Ghani as saying such “terrorist attacks” won’t prevent people from participating in upcoming parliamentary elections.

There you have it…ISIS Sleeper cells…..there has been much written about their possibilities….some pundits even went as far as to call it wishful thinking….just ano0ther story to keep the War on Terror money flowing….

But these “sleeper cells” are a reality that needs to be acknowledged……

Over the past four weeks, ISIS has run a series of articles in its weekly Arabic publication on a vital aspect of the type of threat posed by the organisation today. The central theme relates to how members, who are so far laying low during a military campaign against them, could regroup and resume operations after months of what the group describes as a “slumber” period.

The extensive coverage dedicated to this topic is timely. It follows a noticeable uptick in the group’s operations in recent months in much of Iraq and Syria, in both quantity and quality, since the beginning of the year, according to a senior official in the anti-ISIS global coalition.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/we-have-not-yet-seen-the-full-impact-of-isis-sleeper-cells-coming-back-to-life-1.722796

AS ISIS loses its “territory” these “cells” will become more and more important to the existence of this group.